Cabrillo National Monument

In late September 1542, three ships under Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, sailing for the Spanish crown, put in at a bay Cabrillo named San Miguel, which we now call San Diego Bay. It was the first documented European landfall on the coast of present-day California, and the monument marks that moment with a large statue looking out to sea.

Cabrillo's own story ended badly. He continued north, was injured in a fall on one of the Channel Islands, and died of the wound that winter, and even the location of his grave is unknown. The expedition is remembered less for what it found than for being the first to trace this coast on a European map.

For the Kumeyaay, this headland was never a discovery but a home. They lived across what is now San Diego County and northern Baja for millennia, gathering shellfish along these shores and moving between coast and inland with the seasons. Their descendants remain in the region today on several reservations, and the monument tells the contact story as a meeting of peoples rather than an empty coast waiting to be claimed.

The little Old Point Loma Lighthouse, lit in 1855, is the picture-book landmark on the ridge, a keeper's cottage with a light tower rising from its roof. It seemed like the perfect perch, four hundred feet above the sea, until fog and low clouds kept settling right at that height and hiding the beam from ships. After thirty-six years it was abandoned, and it is now restored to look as it did in the 1880s, furnished as a keeper's home.

Its replacement, the New Point Loma Lighthouse, was built in 1891 far lower on the point, near the water where its light could actually be seen, and it still guides vessels into the harbor. Together the two tell a quiet lesson about the difference between a beautiful location and a useful one.

On the ocean side of the point, reached by a separate road lower down, the rocky intertidal opens up at low tide into one of the better tide-pool areas in Southern California. In the pools and under the ledges you can find anemones, hermit crabs, sea stars, chitons, and small fish, all of it protected, so it is strictly look-and-leave.

From roughly December into March, the cliffs become a whale-watching stand as gray whales pass offshore on their long migration between the Arctic and the lagoons of Baja California. A glassed shelter and overlooks help you scan for the telltale spouts, and dolphins and sea lions are common the rest of the year.

Away from the pavement, the point is cloaked in coastal sage scrub, a fragrant, drought-hardy community of buckwheat, sagebrush, and cactus that once covered much of this coast and is now increasingly rare. A short bayside trail drops through it toward the water.

The reason most people come, in the end, is the outlook. Standing on the ridge you can see the arc of Coronado, the carriers and submarines of the naval base, the downtown towers, and the surf line curling around the peninsula, a compact summary of what San Diego is.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.